NEW YORK — The occasion was so loaded with emotion that it joined with the heat rising from the hard court and made the very air around Serena Williams seem heavy. It was all so much: the ceremonial entrance, the blazing stadium lights and the weighty tributes to the all-time great made her seem prematurely a monument rather than a person. She was still a player in full motion trying to win a first-round match. Just one match. There was the not-ridiculous hope that if Williams could do that, if she could fight her way past this round of the U.S. Open, it might be the start of a great ending.
Serena Williams sheds cape, finds form and owns U.S. Open stage once again
“The atmosphere was a lot,” she said later. “When I walked out the reception was really overwhelming. It was loud and I could feel it in my chest. It was a really good feeling, a feeling I’ll never forget. I was just thinking, ‘Is this real?’ And at the same time, I was thinking ‘I still have a match to play.’ And I wanted to play up to the reception.”
It was a very big ask. Williams, 40, came into the tournament having played just four matches in 14 months, three of which she’d lost. Still, maybe she could find the old inner vibration, the competitive rage that powered her to 23 Grand Slam titles. Williams had always been a player who could lay the racket down for months at a time, and then pick it back up and bang off the rust with the sheer fierceness of her flailing.
“I’m the kind of person who, it just takes one or two things, and then it clicks,” she said three weeks ago during a tournament in Toronto. “So, I’m just waiting on that to click.”
That’s exactly what happened. She came out of the Arthur Ashe Stadium tunnel Monday night for the last big occasion of her career in a mock black evening-gown complete with cape and train — but she had on the black shoes of a boxer. Her competitive instincts clicked back in, and her elbows started flying.
Williams has always had a special affinity for the Open — not just for the high hard bounces of its acrylic courts, but for everything else that’s hard about it. In a way the environment was an opponent in its own right, and it was as though she enjoyed meeting its ruggedness with her brawn, answering its noise with her deep competitive howls, and its hassles by punching the lights out of Danka Kovinic, 6-3, 6-3.
Her will to win cut straight through the cacophony of mass transportation, the sound of jets from LaGuardia Airport vacuuming up the sky, the kerlack-kerlack of street cars rocking along the tracks and the skreeee of train brakes, the yeering of sirens, the gabbling of cocktail-soaked crowds. Her tennis was guttural, louder than all of it, and the appreciative roars built from the crowd.
As she wrote in Vogue magazine in her first-person retirement announcement, “There were so many matches I won because something made me angry or someone counted me out. That drove me. I’ve built a career on channeling anger and negativity and turning it into something good.”
Farewell retirement tournaments are emotionally tricky for all great players, but most especially for the greatest of the greats. In 1989, when Chris Evert played her final Grand Slam tournament at the U.S. Open, the ovations and adulation almost got in her way, threatened to turn her head away from the job at hand. “I’m not out there so they can applaud all the years of tennis,” she said at the time. “I’m out there to win a match.”
Williams voiced a similar ambivalence. “I’m not looking for some ceremonial, final on-court moment,” she told Vogue. “I’m terrible at goodbyes, the world’s worst.”
Clearly, at some point in the past few weeks, Williams decided she wanted this match to be more than just a ceremony, and a terrible goodbye. Just a couple of months ago, she had seemed so diminished after a first-round loss to unseeded Harmony Tan at Wimbledon that she sounded already retired. “Today was what I could do,” she said after that match. “At some point you have to be able to be okay with that. And that’s all I can do. I can’t change time or anything.”
Nevertheless, Williams found a way to wrest the hands of the clock backward, if only for 90-some minutes Monday night. Williams simply hadn’t worked as hard at the game in the past couple of years as she once had, splitting her court time with mothering a 4-year-old daughter, and nurturing venture capital investments. Her game has always relied on supreme fitness and physicality — she said it best herself back in 1999 when she won her first U.S. Open. “I have to go sweat in the sun every day when I could be at the pool with some lemonade.”
She built toward this Open with single-minded commitment. She sharpened her strokes and her fitness by doing something she never had before, asking fellow players to serve as sparring partners in practice matches. Her friend Rennae Stubbs, the former player turned TV analyst who is serving as her coach, told a camera crew after Williams’s last hitting session Monday afternoon, “She’s practiced really, really hard. And you know, she’s trying to do everything she possibly can to be at her very best tonight.”
At first, it seemed like it was too much — she was overwhelmed, too taut. She lost three games in a row to trail by 3-2 in the first set, uptight and short arming the ball. But then it happened — a big windmilling topspin backhand lopped off a corner line for a winner — and everything suddenly elevated, the mood in the stadium, the bullying dynamism of Williams’s strokes, the twist and velocity on her serves. She ripped off the next 11 points.
When she took the first set, concluding it with a barrage of 100-mph serves, she issued the old trademark shuddering scream, “Commme onnnn!”
By triple match point the crowd was on its feet — and it stayed there, roaring, this time not in tribute to the past champion, but to a player who for the moment was still very much present.
Source: WP
